I am senior fellow for environment policy at the Heartland Institute and managing editor of Environment & Climate News. I write about energy and environment issues, frequently focusing on global warming. I have presented environmental analysis on CNN, CNN Headline News, CBS Evening News, MSNBC, Fox News Channel, and several national radio programs. My environmental analysis has been published in virtually every major newspaper in the United States. I studied atmospheric science and majored in government at Dartmouth College. I obtained my Juris Doctorate from Syracuse University.

Every now and then I read a blog post that melts my heart. I truly feel the pain, anguish and anger of the writer. I may not always agree with the writer’s point of view, but I empathize with the writer’s pain nonetheless.

Reading Peter Gleick’s January 5 blog post here at Forbes.com, I experienced that empathy in full force. Gleick’s global warming beliefs are misguided and unsupported by sound science, but I nevertheless empathize with his pain and frustration that few people seem to agree with him. A person of thinner skin than me might be offended by Gleick’s frustration-induced rant, but I believe the best remedy is truth and understanding. Accordingly, I understand Gleick’s pain and I will present some truths that might ease Gleick’s anguish if he listens to them with an open heart and mind.

Gleick sets the tone for his blog post in the very first sentence, where he begins his column by stating, “The Earth’s climate continued to change during 2011….” Here, in the first eight words of his column, Gleick unwittingly reveals one of the primary reasons why he is so wrong in his dire warnings of a human-induced global warming crisis. Gleick and his fellow global warming alarmists are the ultimate climate change deniers.

They present changing climate as unprecedented and unavoidably harmful. They act as if the climate never changed before now. In reality, however, the earth’s long-term, mid-term and short-term climate history is defined by frequent and substantial climate change. Of course, as Gleick states, “The Earth’s climate continued to change during 2011”! When was the last time the Earth’s climate was not undergoing some change? Please, global warming alarmists, stop denying climate change!

Gleick finishes his opening sentence by asserting, “a year in which unprecedented combinations of extreme weather events killed people and damaged property around the world.”

That is quite a bold, unsupported statement. Just what were those extreme weather events? Gleick doesn’t say. Perhaps we can speculate.

It certainly wasn’t hurricanes, as Ryan Maue at the Florida State University Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies documents that global and U.S. hurricane activity has been remarkably quiet for the past few years. During 2009, global accumulated tropical cyclone energy reached a record low, and has remained abnormally quiet in the two-plus years since.

It certainly wasn’t tornadoes, as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports 2011 continued a long-term trend in declining frequency of strong tornadoes. Yes, there were some strong tornadoes in 2011, but there are strong tornadoes every year. The only thing climatically remarkable about the 2011 tornado season is that the relatively few strong tornadoes that did occur happened to beat the odds and touch down more often in urban areas than is usually the case. Unless Gleick is arguing that global warming somehow causes hurricanes to wickedly target disproportionately urban areas, tornadoes like hurricanes are becoming less of a threat during recent decades as the planet has modestly warmed.

It certainly wasn’t drought, as multiple peer reviewed studies report global soil moisture has consistently improved during the past century as the planet has warmed. (See, for example, this study.) Yes, some droughts are going to occur somewhere on the planet each year, as they always have, but cherry-picking one of the increasingly less frequent droughts that still do occur does not constitute evidence that global warming is causing more extreme weather events.

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Whether you know enough math, physics and basic biology has yet to be established.

In other words, Bob Armstrong’s statement represents nothing more than an unsubstantiated, self-serving claim to some level of “expertise” that he believes gives him an exemption from argument based on facts and reason. Include me among the unimpressed.

Lovely. And exactly what proof do you have showing the money received by Dr Soon resulted in which errors in his scientific assessments, that can be traced back to instructions on what to write from Exxon?

As I said before, this is guilt-by-association, particularly when you are unable to the specific money trail details. Try taking this kind of prosecutorial approach into a court of law and see how far you get with it.

(fixed the following q & a for you): “Now, a question for the sane people: does Jeff Masters’ opinion about the extreme weather events of 2011 require ‘expertise in climate science?’ The obvious answer is YES.”

Of course it does, as the conclusion is that man-caused global warming causes extreme weather, and that the current weather is unprecedented. Certainly commenter “cyruspinkerton” would be obligated to agree with this since so many followers of the IPCC and Al Gore are so quick to apply this requirement to any skeptic meteorologists who offer their opinions about extreme weather NOT being any confirmation of the phenomenon. Notice how commenter “cyruspinkerton” completely sidestepped this inexplicable double-standard. Ironic how he uses this as a definition of how “deniers” supposedly operate, when by this very example we all see that it is how his side of the issue often behaves. E.g. the science being “settled”, thus any opposition to it must be motivated by corrupt or illogical reasons.

Replying to this particular comment is almost like shooting fish in a barrel. Notice that despite the best efforts of commenter “cyruspinkerton” to portray contributions as smoking gun evidence, this shows nothing more than …… industry contributions to organizations. Repeating my challenge above, “SHOW US YOUR SPECIFIC PROOF THAT MONEY WAS GIVEN TO SKEPTIC CLIMATE SCIENTISTS IN EXCHANGE FOR FALSE FABRICATED CLIMATE ASSESSMENTS!”

There really is no excuse for commenter “cyruspinkerton’s” inability to provide specific evidence of corrupt agreements proving a conspiracy between the fossil fuel industry and skeptics. And since “cyruspinkerton” has provided a sample what may be nothing more than an industry contributing to an organization that it happens to agree with, “cyruspinkerton” will establish himself or herself as a common sense denier troll if we are blessed with more such failures to meet such a simple challenge.

Commenter “glenntamblyn”: Is this the best you can do? I have listened to the skeptics AND the promoters of man-caused global warming, that is entirely the point of this all. The two sides contradict each other, and in an effort to get to the bottom of the issue, I’m met with comments like this, where the skeptics are portrayed as nothing more than rabble-rousers to a phenomenon that is said to be ‘settled science’ by individuals who aren’t even capable of pointing to who established that a scientific consensus exists or who had the authority to determine which scientists belong to the consensus and which are excluded.

That’s the irony here, when enough analysis is done, we DO have what you describe, but in a counter-opposite way: People like Peter Gleick and operatives from Greenpeace handing out scraps of paper with a few “facts”, telling everyone to avoid whistleblower critics because those people are crooks….. but when you try to find out what evidence there is to prove this corruption, it turns out the only thing Gleick & friends have to rely on are literally unsupportable guilt-by-association accusations.

If you are asked forgo the use of your car to save the planet, do you ignore scientists saying this is a premature decision who laboriously write a pair of multi-hundred page reports citing thousands of peer reviewed science journal papers to back their claims, and instead place all your trust in people who refuse to debate, hide their science data, and label their critics as crooks despite incontrovertible evidence to prove that?

“The public is not told where skeptics are wrong, we are told to ignore them because they’re on the payroll of the fossil fuel industry. Problem is, we have yet to see a solitary bit of evidence to support this accusation.”

russellc00k was proven wrong in his assertion–many of the so-called climate “skeptics” are funded by the fossil fuel industry and examples were provided. So, for the record, russellc00k began his crusade by showing his ignorance of the connection between the fossil fuel industry and science denial.

russellc00k now wants to compound his error by insisting that the financial link between oil & coal companies and climate “skeptics” has no bearing on the work of these scientists. Once again, russellc00k displays his incredible ignorance of the relationship between the fossil fuel industry, policy organizations like the Heartland Institute that specialize in science denial and the scientists who associate with them.

Take Willie Soon for example. Soon is or has been associated with the following science denial policy organizations, all of which receive funding from the fossil fuel industry, directly or indirectly:

To be absolutely clear about this, Soon has many significant ties to policy organizations that pursue public policy based on opposition to regulation of CO2 emissions. These organizations are all funded by the fossil fuel industry. In addition, Soon receives huge funding directly from the fossil fuel industry to support his work.

These facts alone raise serious questions about the credibility of Soon’s research.

Now, if Soon’s work were truly independent and not influenced by his funding sources, it would be expected that at least some small bit of his research would lead to results that proved unfavorable to his fossil fuel industry clients. But by what appears to be the most remarkable of coincidences, every bit of his work produces results favorable to his clients.

Even more problematic is Soon’s interest in topics well outside his area of expertise. For example, did you know that Soon (an aerospace engineer) also claims to be an expert regarding the environmental and health risks associated with mercury? To the great surprise of no one, Soon’s work in this area claims to show that the impact of mercury released into the environment by coal burning power plants is minimal. Oh, and by the way, his work in this area of Soon’s “expertise” was funded by the coal industry.

Similarly Soon apparently claims expertise in the field of polar bear ecology. You see, according to the research of Soon and colleagues, polar bear habitat loss resulting from global warming is not serious. Of course, Soon’s polar bear ecology study was funded by ExxonMobil, the American Petroleum Institute (API) and the Charles G Koch Charitable Foundation. Isn’t it amazing how that worked out?

Now, as russellc00k points out, none of this evidence proves beyond a shadow of doubt that the integrity of Soon’s research is completely compromised by the fact that he’s in bed with the fossil fuel industry. Similarly, the fact that the strange, single, older gentleman in the neighborhood who likes to dress up like a clown and invite young boys over to his house for cookies and milk isn’t automatically proven guilty when the decomposing bodies of small children are discovered in his basement. However, any sane and rational person would definitely suspect the clown of foul play.

russellc00k doesn’t seem to understand how a court of law works. US criminal courts work on the standard of “reasonable doubt.” In civil cases, courts adopt the standard of “preponderance of the evidence.” Based on the “preponderance of the evidence” standard, there is no doubt that it would be reasonable and fair to conclude that the integrity and credibility of Soon’s work has been compromised by his connection to the fossil fuel industry.

According to russellc00k, commenting on the extreme weather events of 2011 requires expertise in climate science. What are the logical consequences of russellc00k’s position?

One consequence is that russellc00k is not qualified to comment on the extreme weather events of 2011 since he lacks expertise in climate science. A second consequence is that James Taylor is not qualified to comment on the extreme weather events of 2011 since he lacks expertise in climate science.

Therefore, according to russellc00k, James Taylor should shut up and remove this week’s blog entry. Unfortunately russellc00k will not be back to comment further this week because he needs to remove himself from the conversation as a result of his lack of relevant expertise.

@ cyruspinkerton I have attended a couple of Heartland’s conferences , and had my admission fee comped for one . See my http://CoSy.com for just about anything you want to know about me .

As a result of some email exchanges , Joe Bast of Heartland invited me to create an “Essential_Physics” page on their new climatewiki.org . I have not mentioned it because , 1) being an unremunerated activity , it’s difficult to find time to work on it , and 2) a couple of months ago the website suffered some sort of attack and the posting of images has not yet been reestablished making it not worth my time to work on until that’s fixed .

As I state at the foot of that page , “… this site needs the knowledges of more minds . However , the purpose of this site is to nail down the physics . Thus only data and explicit experimentally verified or verifiable quantitative , computable assertions , ie , equations and their explanations and proofs are admissible .” I have felt frustrated at not having the page in shape to invite other input , but I had wanted at a minimum to incorporate my implementation of the computation of the temperature of anisotropically irradiated anisotropically shaded gray balls in a half dozen lines of an array programming language , and hopefully the few additional lines to extend the computation to full spectral maps so the bulk of the 10c “unexplained” difference between our observed temperature and that of a gray ball can be addressed before promulgating it . ( I don’t know what spectral data is available , nor do I have the time to evaluate it ; I’m just a good array language programmer only involved in this issue because of the mendacious mediocrity I see being foisted by the doomsters . )

As James Taylor’s number of $7e6 for Heartland’s yearly budget indicates , us realists are generally operating on a shoe string , or at our own expense compared to the massive cash flows available from global governments and other watermelon groups . The idea that we are whores , in it for the cash , would be laughable if anything about this attack on human welfare and freedom ( not to mention all green , and therefore all , life ) were laughable .

That’s all the time I can afford on this dreck today . My response to glenntamblyn’s more substantive comments will have to wait til at least tomorrow .

Now that I’ve opened my kimono , how about you cyrus ? You seem to have lots of time for these battles . Are you somebody’s whore ?